Avast, ye scurvy dogs! —

BPI requests UK Pirate Party shut down Pirate Bay proxy

We don't think they'll do it.

The British Phonographic Industry has reportedly sent a letter demanding the UK Pirate Party shut down their Pirate Bay proxy service.

Leader of the UK Pirate Party, Loz Kaye, told TorrentFreak that although the party is yet to receive the letter the BPI had also sent an e-mail containing a similar request. Kaye went on to add that the party has no intention of complying with the request.

"The first I was aware that such a letter had been sent was when I received requests for comment from journalists," said Kaye. "At this point, all I have is an e-mail from the BPI with a request. We are not aware of any legal action being taken by anyone against us. We will of course stick to our principles."

"Pirate Party UK's free speech arguments are a complete red herring," the BPI's Geoff Taylor states in the letter as reported by Music Week. "We are passionate believers in freedom of speech, but it doesn't justify The Pirate Bay helping themselves to other people's work. The human rights implications of blocking this illegal site have been fully considered by the High Court. Whatever their views, Pirate Party UK are no more above the law than anyone else."

According to Kaye, "The battle against censorship and indeed the use of site blocking to deal with issues like copyright infringement is disproportionate and not productive. Issues like these are at the core of why we exist and why we want to change the current system and stand up for internet users."

The UK Pirate Party is expected to issue an official response to the request by December 6.

25 Reader Comments

People will find a way around any blocks that are imposed, either via high profile proxies like this or any number of free proxies/vpn's which can be set up with no more than a simple Google search.

BPI, RIAA, MPAA etc simply do not understand that blocking access to these sites simply makes the myriad of legal content distributed via the bittorrent protocol (even if not TPB directly) harder to access - anyone *actually* wanting to pirate something will simply find any other way to do so.

The BPI are are trying to stop the tide coming in by organizing a bunch of self serving bastards with teacups which is why they are going to be as successful as the Dodo.

If for whatever reason PP UK does shut down, you can count on MAFIAAFire to start our own service to pick up the slack - either way, the BPI are gonna get kicked in their nutsack (can't really think of many others who deserve it more though).

Yeah - I'm not exactly how it's going to work because there will always be some sort of anonymous service providing redirecting services out of their reach, VPN tunnels, lets face it: Its the worldwide internet and trying to stop a particular part from being accessible is about as successful as trying to exterminate rats.

I really, really wish they wouldn't do this. Not because I support piracy, but because Tor is really easy to use, and if pirates start using Tor, it'll be harder to finger the people who are smuggling drugs, weapons, and humans using darknets to hide their activities. There are other services like Tor available that don't ever leave their own encrypted section of the Internet. After that, there are stegonography tools that can be applied to Internet traffic.

I think folks like MAFIAA fire are missing a really great opportunity to draw the ire of the MAFIAA. Two things need to exist: 1) simple software for encrypting a steganographic message into any image file. 2) A Firefox plug-in that scans a website's image files for magnet links.

Now, of course, there is a lot of activation rotation to be done; perhaps you need to know the password to unscramble the magnet links on Site A which would be different from Site B. That's a function of the plug-in. "We've detected one of the N* known cryptographic headers embedded in an image, would you like to enter a password to decode and then fire up the application you have keyed to launch magnet apps?"

Individuals should be able to augment the centralised lists with crypto headers manually programmed in to their plug-in. In this way the MAFIAA has to scan not only for magnet links, but images. They have to compare the images against known headers and know the specific password for that torrent. They have no way of identifying locally programmed crypto headers.

I could go on, but you get the idea. It's fairly easy to embed information in this fashion. As long as I can get packets from A to B, then I can create a tunnel of some variety. It should even be theoretically possible to create a self-healing mesh of tunnels where the entire network can flux on a dime using distribution by something as simple as QR code, or a message embedded in a common meme image.

Oh well. Maybe in the future.

*Where N is a list of valid cyrpto headers maintained on a mirror list similar to malwaredomains.com's text fiel of malware domains.

So it's illegal to host .torrent files. And it's illegal to host magnet links for torrents. And it's now illegal to proxy users to sites that host magnet links for torrent files?

How recursive can this get?

Is it really illegal to host magnet links? Because I think you'll find Google caches all the magnet links on TPB (and a lot of other sites). The easiest way around the UK blocking is to google for what you want with "piratebay magnet" added to the end of it. Then click on "Cached" and grab the magnet link.

So it's illegal to host .torrent files. And it's illegal to host magnet links for torrents. And it's now illegal to proxy users to sites that host magnet links for torrent files?

How recursive can this get?

Until they can control what we think.

Honestly, I got the feeling long ago that the **AA entities want us to pay every time we think (even in part) about copyrighted pieces under their control, and of course copyrights would last until heat death minus the smallest time unit we can measure at that point in time (since technically that would be a "limited" amount of time).

Here in NL we have a similar organisation using ex-parte judgements to force ISPs to block TPB and shut down proxies to it. The fun part about this is that they released a press release stating that their legal action had been a massive success (even though this directly opposes the result of studies that two Universities did).

It all makes sense when you read their study: they compared the number of connection attempts (SYNs) to the IP that TPB uses for the affected ISPs, before and after the (complete) block on that exact IP... Obviously they came up with a 99.8% reduction, doh.

Let's hope they truly believe their own shit

Haravikk wrote:

Omoronovo wrote:

any number of free proxies/vpn's which can be set up with no more than a simple Google search.

Even better than that; if you have a pirate bay URL you can't get to, just shove it into Google search and see if Google has a cached version of the page

I really hope that someone in the Pirate Party stands in my local elections. Pretty, pretty please with Sugar on top. I'm sick of the usual suspects, with slick soundbites, crappy suits, and a total lack of understanding almost all issues involving anything Digital. All of them parroting similar empty promises, just as they did at the last election. Not one has made me even start to think they give a shit about anything other than the cushy ride ahead if they get elected, and actually give a damn about the issues I care about. I'm a salesman myself, and it's easy to see through the bullshit, and see someone who actually bloody cares. They are selling a product they do not believe in.

Does the BPI really not know that there is not a chance they'll stop, short of a Court order, for all the good shutting down one proxy will do.

That said, mindless corporate funded "action group" based around a 1950's business model with no plan of action to adapt to one that will work in a digital age? Yup, easily that stupid.